


Forwarding The Cause Of Science

by canadianwheatpirates



Category: Person of Interest (TV)
Genre: F/F, Portal AU, Shootweek18
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-26
Updated: 2018-06-26
Packaged: 2019-05-29 04:24:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,643
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15065087
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/canadianwheatpirates/pseuds/canadianwheatpirates
Summary: '“Welcome to the Aperture Science Computer-Aided Enrichment Center. You can call me Root.” Wait, she knows that voice: it's the woman who’d tied her to a chair and threatened her with an iron.'After Relevance, Shaw doesn't wake up in the back of an ambulance; instead, she's somewhere much worse.





	Forwarding The Cause Of Science

**Author's Note:**

> [Turns up to Shoot Week a month late with Starbucks]
> 
> I saw this prompt last year and spent a year figuring out how to do it. Sadly around shoot week life decided to dunk right on me (it's a saga, hit me up on tumblr for it) and I didn't get the chance to finish it. Thankfully Ariyah is an actual angel and let me post it in the tag regardless.
> 
> Rated teen for a slightly gross injury and Shaw swearing like a sailor in her internal monologue.

"Good morning, Indigo Five.”

Shaw jerks awake. That’s a surprise by itself; Hersh must’ve used a nonlethal dose of acontine instead of killing her. Nausea crashes over her and she shuts her eyes again  — definitely acontine.

“Welcome to the Aperture Science Computer-Aided Enrichment Center. You can call me Root.” Wait, she knows that voice: it's the woman who’d tied her to a chair and threatened her with an iron. Did not-Veronica  — “Root”, apparently  — dump her in here to pick up where she’d left off? Was it the ISA? Root had bailed before the Activity turned up, so they’re either working against each other or they’ve gotten so tangled up in their clandestine bullshit that they don't know they're on the same side. It wouldn't be the first time. 

She swallows and sits up, shielding her eyes against the burn of the fluorescents. The cell is moderately sized, with walls made of glass; it houses a bare metal end table and a toilet as well as the bed she’d been sprawled out on. Every surface of the room beyond is paneled in the same large, light grey tiling. A corridor goes off to her right, but turns a corner before it reveals anything useful.

“We hope your brief detention in the relaxation vault has been a pleasant one,” Root continues, and Shaw snorts. Either the message is prerecorded or she has a twisted sense of humour. “Your identity has been processed and we are now ready to begin the test.”

Shaw looks down at herself. Her old clothes have been stolen and replaced with pants and a tank top, all covered in a bright orange jumpsuit. Worse, they took her combat boots. The cuffs of her jumpsuit have been rolled up to the knee, and a ring of metal is clamped to each of her calves blow them; it doesn’t feel surgical, luckily, but it fits snugly enough to dig into her skin. Red lights blink at her from the inside of each knee and a strip of metal runs down from the back of the ring, ending a couple of inches below her heel. 

Gingerly, she swings her legs down off the bed and sets her feet on the floor. Only her toes touch the ground, and the metal heels push back strongly when the leans on them; they should absorb a good amount of the landing shock from falls, at least.

“Although fun and learning are the primary goals of the Enrichment Center activities, serious injuries may occur — though given your work history I doubt you worry much about that."

Wrong: she worries exactly the right amount about serious injury. She keeps her mouth shut, however; the more incorrect assumptions this… whatever makes, the more avenues of escape she’ll have.

“The relaxation vault will open in three… two… one…” The glass wall in front of her slides down into the floor. “Please proceed to the elevator.”

She stands up, her aching muscles protesting at the movement. Fucking acontine. Hersh hadn't even had the chivalry to catch her when she fell. 

The braces make it easier to run than to walk so she breaks into a light jog, following the corridor. Above her a camera clicks and whirs, tracking her movements. There’s another one at the corner; apparently total surveillance is the order of the day. A hole opens up in the wall with an electronic whoosh as she reaches the turn. She stops and peers at it; it’s slightly taller than her, ringed around the edge with shifting blue particles. On the other side there’s a section of room, covered in yet more grey tile, though this one drops off sharply on the left. An upper level?

Nope. This is too fucking much to deal with right now. She turns the corner and continues down the corridor. 

It’s not far before the room opens out in front of her. Two terraces rise up, blocking her way to the exit. She’s seen designs like that in the experimental part of her psych rotation; it's built to intimidate, to trick the lab rat into going back to where you need it.

Hell no. 

She dashes forward and leaps upwards. The jump carries her just high enough; she grabs the edge of the first platform, feet scrabbling against the smooth wall for a purchase. Her shoulders scream as she drags herself up onto the floor, and she takes a second to lie there and catch her breath. 

Dying really takes it out of you. 

“While your athleticism is impressive,” Root leers (without having a body, somehow), “the objective of the exercise is to use the portals. Proficiency in portal use is critical to your success in future tests.”

It strikes her that telling her what strategies to use later on might bias the experiment, but if their AI is dumb enough to screw up so easily then that’s their problem. She picks herself up and trots up to the next platform. It’s too high to jump, even for her, and she frowns. An orange shimmer at the top tells her that there’s an open portal; presumably the blue one is the other end. 

Crap. She’s been lab ratted. 

She jumps down from the terrace; sure enough, the braces take the shock and make it feel like she’s landed from a standing jump. The hole is still there, flickering blue at the edges. She pokes her pinky finger inside and, when it remains attached, steps through. 

Her stomach lurches. She takes two steps away from the portal and collapses against the wall, retching. 

“There may be a few kinks to iron out with the quantum tunnelling. You’ll get used to it. Proceed to the elevator,” Root says airily.

Shaw spits out a mouthful of bile and scowls up at a nearby camera. She pushes away from the wall and looks back through the portal; sure enough, she can see down the corridor to her cell. Over the edge of the platform she spies the blue portal down below.

Alright then. Weird two-way space-skipping tunnel link. A shaky one, if the sickness is anything to go by. The corridor continues on to her right and she follows it, hoping that those are the last portals she’ll be faced with  — until the last of the poison is out of her system, at least.

Grey walls, twisting and turning; it’s enough to disorient a person. Not her, of course, but someone whose sense of direction hadn’t been tested by the ISA dropping them in the wilderness too many times to count, perhaps. Eventually she comes to a low-ceilinged room, lit by a frosted observational window. A large red button sits in the middle; wires trail from it to a closed, circular door. Machinery rumbles away somewhere deep beneath her feet.

There must be a way to keep the door open as she goes through. Hang on — the shadows in the corner are wrong. She squints into the dark and then grabs the offending object, dragging it in front of the window. It’s a metal crate, about three foot high, the side emblazoned with the Aperture Science logo and the words “weighted storage cube”. 

That’ll do. 

She crouches and hefts the crate onto her shoulder. It weighs about the same as her, which would be fine if her muscles weren’t jelly. She staggers the few steps to the button and drops the crate on it heavily. 

The door beeps and slides open. 

“Congratulations. Before you enter the elevator,  note the incandescent particle field across the exit.”

Shaw notes the incandescent particle field. It glows blue, rippling back and forth between two (electric?) bars set into the walls.

“This Aperture Science Material Emancipation Grille will vapourize any unauthorized equipment that passes through it. For instance, the Aperture Science Weighted Storage Cube."

She looks back at the cube. There's no way to bring it with her, and no reason to; if she were feeling needlessly destructive she could stand on the button and throw the cube into the grille, but that would just leave her trapped. Warily, she trots through the door. Stabbing pain rips through her earlobes ash she crosses the grille; she brings her fingers to one and finds blood. It’s “emancipated” her earrings  — and a bit of her ear. 

Apparently if Root doesn’t kill her, the shitty calibrations will.

Gently, she probes at the wound. The holes are only a couple of millimeters wide; they should heal fine as long as they don’t get infected (a real risk, in a place like this).

It’s not like she has any medical supplies, so she wipes her fingers on her jumpsuit and jogs down to the elevator. Like everything else in this place it's unappealingly grey, too cheap to be sleek.  She gets in and sits down on the floor. The doors slide shut and the mechanism clanks as it starts to descend, carrying her deeper into the facility. 

 

As much as she hates to admit it, the portals are fun. She tosses a cube through one and watches it bounce to a halt, stopping directly on the button. The door slides open, and she trots towards it. 

“Very good,” Root says. “Since you have demonstrated a greater than average proficiency with portals, we will skip the next section of the test. Proceed to the elevator.”

There’s a metallic pouch in the middle of the lift’s floor; it shines dully, like the packaging of the MREs back in Afghanistan, and she picks it up. A straw is taped to the underside. She rips it off, stabs it through the foil and takes a sip. The liquid is thick and aggressively bland, like it had been specifically engineered to have no flavour at all. 

The lift keeps descending, skipping the next floors. A place this big is either a skyscraper or deep underground; there’s no way to tell until she finds a damn window. 

“In the next room you with find the Aperture Science Handheld Portal Device, which will allow you to make your own portals. 23% of test subjects die before successfully using it to solve the following test, but the odds of that happening to someone in your IQ block are twenty-three thousand to one.” 

Shaw finishes drinking and drops the pouch on the floor. The elevator doors scrape open and she follows a staircase up towards the test chamber. At the top she finds a closed door, and a pedestal holding what must be the portal device. It’s elegantly curved, the outside plated in white-painted metal; one end glows a faint blue. She picks it up and turns it over, examining it more closely. There’s no obvious trigger, but the device has a hole in the back big enough for her hand. 

What is is with these people and technology that goes halfway up your limbs?

The grip inside the gun is comfortable, at least, which helps make up for the awkward angle it forces her wrist into. There are two buttons on it. Her other hand settles naturally underneath the front of the gun; she points it at a wall and presses one of them. An orange portal whooshes open in front of her. Success.

“Now that you are in possession of The Device, here is your obligatory safety briefing. Do not touch the operational end of The Device. Do not look directly at the operational end of The Device. Do not submerge The Device in liquid, even partially. Most importantly, under no circumstances should you—" A burst of static crackles through the speakers, cutting off the last part of the message. Great.

She turns her attention back to the door. There’s no obvious way to open it, unlike the previous ones. She walks closer and knocks on it to check whether it’s real. The blows thud dully; it certainly seems like every other door in the place. Her gaze travels upward, looking for any flaw or crack or  — there!  The wall has a small gap in it, right at the top.

She raises the portal gun, aims carefully, and presses the other button. The blue portal opens on the roof inside, and she smiles a little. It’s only a short step through the orange portal; she lands inside the room easily, acclimatised now to the fleeting twist-lurch of the dimensional shift. 

In front of her is another door, this time with a button linked to it  — but no cube to hold it down. She steps onto the button and the door slides open as usual. The panels behind it are the same colour as the rest; she shoots a portal at them and  — yes!  — she has a way past. She reopens the other portal in the wall beside her (it’s no use if it’s in the roof) and ducks through it, taking off down the corridor.

Set into the wall on the right, partway down the corridor, is a darker panel. As she approaches it takes on clearer detail; it’s dark grey, almost black, grittier-looking than the ones around it. She shoots an experimental portal at it on the way past. The particles bounce off and scatter, fizzling away to nothing. Slowly the corridor becomes dimmer, more and more of the walls replaced by portal-proof tiles, until she has to squint to keep her bearings.

Finally, she trots out onto a platform. The room is narrow, tiled in dark grey except the roof and floor. There’ a pit between her and the door, as usual, but this time it’s filled with water. In the middle there’s a small platform that holds a button on a pedestal.

The distance is easily swimmable, but that’s probably a bad idea; the portal gun might shock her to death if it gets wet. Okay. Roof and floor. It’s a bit of a drop, but nothing she can’t handle. Just don’t fall into the water. 

She shoots a portal in the floor at her feet, the other in the roof, and steps forward. The island is right below her, and she lands in an easy crouch. A push of the button opens the door, as expected, but the pedestal starts to tick loudly. She retreats as far as she can, ready to drop the portal gun and dive into the water if it explodes. 

The door shuts right on the fifth tick. Hm. That’s slightly inconvenient. She shoots one portal directly above it and the other right behind her; if she’s quick, she can just drop down and walk through. 

Her fist comes down on the button and she leaps backwards. This time she rolls when she lands, letting the momentum carry her through the door. 

“Fun fact: The Device is  more valuable than the organs and combined incomes of everyone in your hometown. ” says Root. 

She weighs the gun in her hands as she walks towards the elevator. They’ve given her a tool  — a powerful one, by the look of it. Time to see what trouble she can get up to.

 

“Please stop destroying my surveillance equipment, Indigo Five.”

Shaw leans out through the portal and kicks the camera again, hard; it breaks away from the wall and falls to the ground. If she’s going to have to run these bullshit challenges, then at least she’s going to make it useless to the ISA  — or anyone else who might be watching. Another camera twitches and spins to face her. Thoughtfully, she raises her portal gun and pulls the trigger; the wall behind it vanishes and it drops away, sparking from its severed wires. 

She smiles to herself a little and drops down from the platform. One of the panels in this wall is pushed forward just far enough to slip behind; it's hidden from the front, but vanishing behind it would’ve been a giveaway. 

The inside is dark, the only light filtering in from the test chamber behind her. Once her eyes adjust, she can see that the walls aren’t just covered in grime; someone has written all over them. They’re mostly cries for help, a few handprints, tallies of days. An artist has drawn a surprisingly good rendition of a camera, captioned with SHE’S WATCHING YOU  — no shit.

A crate is pushed up against one of the walls, couple of cans sitting  on top of it. She picks one up and checks the label: beans. There’s no can opener, and no surface rough enough that she could grind the seal down. Dropping it from a height might work? Anything is better than another pouch of nutrient slurry. 

She sighs and sets the can back down. The only way to open it would be to open portals in the roof and floor, and let it fall until it reached its maximum speed; the landing from that would splatter the contents, and she’s not desperate enough to scrape beans off a floor this dirty.

Another piece of graffiti catches her eye as she turns to leave. Five words, repeated four times: “The cake is a lie”. Root lying about something is important enough to write down? She frowns, and files it away in the back of her mind.

 

The lift thumps to a halt as she finishes stretching out her wrist.  _ Fuck _ that portal gun is uncomfortable.

She jogs forward, pauses inside the door and checks out the setup; the jolts of pain from a deep bruise on her thigh remind her to get the measure of a chamber before she goes jumping around. The exit is placed high up in the far wall, a short platform extending out in front of it. There’s a pit between her and it, of course; the drop is the furthest one she’s seen yet. Most of the chamber is tiled in that impenetrable black, except the floor of the pit and a patch opposite the door. Above her the roof of the chamber is open, cables dangling down into it from far up in the darkness. She catches a glimpse of a metal catwalk  — that means maintenance access, loading docks, a way out. But how to get up there?

“Fling yourself,” Root advises, and it takes Shaw a moment to realise that she’s talking about the test. “As you may have noticed by now, momentum is conserved between portals; speedy thing goes in, speedy thing comes out.”

The gulf between her and the exit is dimly lit, but the floor seems to be the right colour. One of the cables hangs low enough to grab, swaying slightly over the pit. Her gaze flicks from it to the floor to the wall. If Root is right about the momentum  — and it does stack up with what she’s seen so far  — then she should be able to fling herself up to it.

She fires one portal into the floor under it and another one closer to the edge where she stands. Diving off the edge is almost second nature, especially since her leg braces have broken every fall she’s made so far. She pulls her limbs in as she falls, trying to build up some extra speed. Her head spins when she drops into the portal, flipping from falling  _ down _ to falling  _ up _ , but she quickly rights herself. The cable draws closer and she stretches out as far as she can, her shoulder straining with the reach. Her fingers brush it, but she can’t get a proper grip. 

She hangs in the air just long enough to curse under her breath.

“Oh, sorry about the mess,” Root simpers as she drops away. The cable retracts up into the darkness with a loud whirr. “It's easy to forget about the little things.”

Fucking asshole robot. She twists around in mid air and shoots a portal at the wall, flipping off a camera as she falls through the one beneath her. As promised, the momentum throws her out horizontally; she gets her feet under her just in time to land lightly on the platform, running a few steps to shake off the last of the speed.

“Great job,” Root says as the door opens. “Due to a mistake when the facility was being constructed, the room after this one is the employee break room. If you’re lucky, the coffee machine will still work.”

It’s probably a trap. No, scratch that; it’s  _ definitely _ a trap. But there’s no way out other than forward, and you can learn a lot about an enemy from their methods.

She crosses the small antechamber to the door labelled “Break Room”. Unlike the others it’s hinged on one side, and has a handle rather than opening automatically. She slowly pulls it open and takes a couple of steps into the room beyond. It’s empty, with no other exits.

“I lied a little bit,” Root says. “There’s no break room, but there  _ is  _ a large dose of deadly neurotoxin.”

The vents in the roof hiss as the gas comes on. What the  _ fuck _ ? She turns and sprints back through the door  —

— and slams straight into a panel that wasn't there before. Staggered by the impact, she grabs the sleeve of her jumpsuit and tugs at it. The seam tears and she brings the cloth to her face as a crude mask. 

“Don’t bother, Indigo Five. Just lie down, and a Relocation Associate will come for you shortly.”

Like hell. Her lungs burn and she can feel her legs starting to buckle. She drops to her knees, darkness creeping in at the edges of her vision. She looks up and around for another escape route, but there’s nothing; Root has her boxed right in. 

The rest of her muscles give out and she collapses onto the floor. Faintly, she hears Root say, “We’re going to have so much fun together.”

Her voice is weak from disuse and hoarse from the gas, barely more than a whisper. “Shit.”

**Author's Note:**

> I'm definitely considering writing more, but that's definitely an "after crossroads au" thing. Speaking of, I'm probably going to finish crau for the POI big bang that's happening, so no more until November (but it'll be done!)
> 
> If you let me know what you liked, I can put more of it into the future chapters :D


End file.
